Comedian Darrell Hammond hopes to help others with story of trauma, recovery

Terry Mikesell The Columbus Dispatch @Terrymikesell

Thursday

Apr 18, 2019 at 12:01 AMApr 18, 2019 at 7:26 AM

During his career on “Saturday Night Live,” Darrell Hammond has portrayed more than 100 characters.

But the most difficult role for Hammond to play might be himself.

In the documentary “Cracked Up,” Hammond and director Michelle Esrick recount the 50 years the comic has spent in and out of mental-health institutions, abusing drugs and alcohol and cutting himself repeatedly before finally finding the help he so desperately needed.

“It’s safe to say that was the only ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ moment of my life,” Hammond said during a telephone interview.

Hammond and Esrick will attend a screening of the movie at “Faces of Resilience” on April 24 at Mershon Auditorium. At the event, a fundraiser for the Stress, Trauma and Resilience program at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and the OSU Harding Hospital, Hammond and Esrick will answer questions from the audience.

Hammond’s problems stemmed from his childhood in Melbourne, Florida, where his mother physically and mentally abused him and his father, who fought in World War II and Korea, had troubles of his own. Hammond had no one to turn to for help.

The experiences remained bottled up and festering inside him.

“Worse than the crime itself is the years and years and years of being expected not to tell,” Hammond said, “and you enter into the basic contract between perpetrator and victim, which is, I’ll kill you if you tell. As it is, you’re just a cripple for life. You live with that.”

One experience was so scarring that, for decades afterward, Hammond suffered from hallucinations so terrifying that he could control the visions only by cutting himself.

“It basically creates a manageable crisis,” Hammond says in the movie. “I’ve got to attend to this blood. And the image would go away.”

After years of treatment and decades of misdiagnoses, in 2010 Hammond was close to suicide when he arrived at The Haven, a psychiatric center in White Plains, New York, where he was treated by Dr. Nabil Kotbi. There, Kotbi said that Hammond had suffered a mental injury inflicted by the childhood trauma.

In other words, the problem wasn’t that something was wrong with Hammond; rather, something had happened to him to cause the issue.

“People were approaching me as if mental illness was an airborne virus, as if this had come from nowhere and a bunch of drugs would fix it. That’s the way it went for a long time,” Hammond said. “Of course, you go through that for years and years and years, and you know it’s not true and you know it’s not right, and in your heart of hearts, one day you’re going to have to come to grips with the idea that it happened to you, it happened to you for a long time, and it happened at the hands of people who were supposed to be protecting you.”

Hammond acknowledged that Kotbi rescued him.

“That’s a pretty good characterization,” Hammond said. “He might object to the wording, but it was end-of-the-road time. This was a lockdown. This was ‘next step, permanent hospitalization.’ Like it had been decades trying to figure out what was wrong with me. All these people tried their best and they couldn’t. Rescued? Not a bad word.”

In 2011, Hammond published his memoir, “God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m (Expletive),” and in 2015 adapted the book into a one-man play.

As he wrote the play, Esrick, who has known Hammond for 20 years, offered to help by typing as Hammond dictated. That was when Hammond told her that he had received a diagnosis of a mental injury.

“I wanted to let everybody know that this is a biological issue,” Esrick said, "that childhood trauma creates ill health downstream because it rearranges the architecture of the developing brain in a child. It creates a mental injury that we can work on, and there’s recovery there.”

Hammond agreed.

“I think Michelle convinced me that it could help people, and it looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen,” he said.

“The idea of helping someone just by sharing my story is sort of irresistible. Why wouldn’t I?”

That help was validated after Hammond and Esrick were interviewed about the movie on National Public Radio.

Afterward, a woman emailed Esrick that she was on the brink of suicide but hearing the interview persuaded her to live.

“They say if you save one life, it can make a path for a million more, and I know there are so many people who are suffering and they don’t understand what they’re suffering from,” Esrick said. “They don’t understand they’re suffering from the effects of childhood trauma.”

Hammond finds fulfillment in stories such as this.

“It makes you feel like, if your story could help someone, then maybe all this stuff didn’t happen for no reason,” Hammond said. “That would be the worst feeling in the world for me, like, oh, that all these things that happened; these people got away with it. I was crippled, had to spend a million dollars on therapy — and for nothing. Nobody likes to think their life is for nothing. I think the idea that maybe sharing this story is appealing to me, maybe on a selfish level.”

For help with a mental health or substance abuse crisis, call the Netcare Access Crisis Hotline: 614-276-2273. For a list of resources about childhood mental trauma, visit the movie website, www.crackedupmovie.com.

tmikesel@dispatch.com

@terrymikesell

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